Ben Snowden Small Picture Collection

Photographs from the Ben Snowden Small Picture Collection SC3964. The Snowden Family of Clinton, Knox County, Ohio, was an African-American family of musicians who performed banjo and fiddle tunes and sang popular songs for black and white audiences throughout rural central Ohio from the 1850s to the early twentieth century. African-Americans in Knox County have long claimed that Daniel D. Emmett learned the song "Dixie" from the Snowdens.

For further information about the Snowden family, you can consult:Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).

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